Talk:Voluntary childlessness

The pet rooster

Is the image of a woman talking to her pet rooster really the best image to represent voluntary childlessness? Fephisto (talk) 04:27, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

From what I have read, some people prefer pets to children. Pick another picture if you want. Nerd271 (talk) 16:44, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

Absence of criticism section

Should there be a criticism section? I say this in relation to the article being voluntary childlessness and thus a choice. Perhaps criticism in relation to ideological aspects like antinatalism, a view that does have note of criticism in its article. Zilch-nada (talk) 11:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Moral reason

There is no mention of the most important reason to be child free,IMO, that it is immoral to impose a life of struggles and pain onto another being. 50.206.145.234 (talk) 21:58, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Celebrities

I'm not sure if we need a large section on celebrities who pursue this lifestyle. Nerd271 (talk) 00:11, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

100% agree. Why is this wiki entry so long? 18.10.77.197 (talk) 20:52, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, and what's up with all the really strange, unnecessary pictures? It's like it's purposefully edited to make this lifestyle look as kooky and crazy as possible. Fephisto (talk) 16:23, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Page Changes

My main goal was to try to be bold and clean up some of the accretion here. The article goes on for quite a while and it's difficult to read. Importantly, a lot of the lists had items that were listed multiple times and were very redundant, so I tried to recategorize them and bundle them together a bit more. Finally, a lot of the pictures seemed really haphazard or looked so weird that I wonder whether they were an attempt to discredit the page, so I tried to limit it to one per section.

I think the statistics section could really be condensed into general view instead of a "country by country" or "region by region" view, as there's a lot of unnecessary overlap with the "Aging of..." articles.

As for the third section, it has a lot of overlap with the first section, but I don't quite know how to handle it. It might be best to try to merge the first and third sections into one somehow. For example, the "Selfish" issue/ethical reasons/religion seems like parts of a good lede for the "Philosophical" reasons section. Something like that maybe?

Fephisto (talk) 21:31, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

@Fephisto: Please keep working on this article. I could use some attention. Nerd271 (talk) 20:53, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Fephisto: I copied the page over into my sandbox. If you want to help rewrite this article, please go there. Nerd271 (talk) 23:03, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@Seraphimblade: In case you have not noticed, Fephisto and I rewrote this page. We both agreed that the previous (major) version was much worse because it was more like an outline than an article. We did it on my sand box. Like everyone else, you are welcome to improve this page. Drive-by templating is ill-advised. Nerd271 (talk) 14:25, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

NPOV

This article has a fair amount of weasel wording problems, but also a lot of issue with overall tone. The photo captions certainly are an issue; they should just describe the image, not use it to say "Oh look and that proves...". Similarly, a good deal of the rest of this article seems to be advocating this position, rather than simply describing the fact that it is and has historically been controversial, why, and presenting referenced facts about it so that the reader can learn about it and make up their own mind. While I personally agree that it's perfectly fine for someone to decide not to have children, the article shouldn't be pushing that, or any, position. It should present actual facts (environmental impact and so on), of course, but in a neutral way, and if "some say" something, it needs to be specified who "some" is and why their thoughts are of particular significance. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 14:13, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Public opinion polls do not generally state the identities of the interviewees for obvious reasons. And since this is still a controversial topic, of course certain things are going to be vague. Moreover, we have both sections explaining why some want to be childfree and why some criticize this lifestyle choice. I don't see a problem here, except that more information could be added. Nerd271 (talk) 14:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

The "who" need not be an individual. If it's results from an opinion poll, it can be specified as (for an example, this is not of course actually the case) "In a 2015 Gallup poll, 60.3% of respondents answered 'Yes' to the question...". Then the "who" is, well, 60.3% of respondents to that poll; we don't need or want to individually list all their names, and of course couldn't anyway. But that's then specified in some way, rather than a nebulous "Some...". Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 14:41, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

This has previously been addressed. Saying, "According to this poll,..." again and again is repetitive and tiring. So another editor, Fephisto, decided to change it to more or less where it is now. You are free to bring some of that back. I suppose switching between the two styles for the sake of variety is a good thing. Vigorous writing should not bore the reader to death. This does not mean that we should pursue sensationalism, of course. But there is nothing in this article that could be categorized as such. Nerd271 (talk) 14:49, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, the style could be varied, but "some" without further qualification isn't workable at all, even once. (And I know for me, reading and seeing that is a record scratch, not good style—"Wait, who is this 'Some' who say this, and why do I care what they think?".) But I'm sure there could be some different ways found to word it, so that every "Some" is made specific and contextualized without being unduly repetitive. The weasel words aren't the only issue, though; there's a fair few overall problems in tone. I'll try to collect some of those as well The photo captions were one example, those need trimmed down to just describing the image. A photo caption shouldn't generally be very long. But in the end, if the choice is "boring, repetitive, and neutral" or "exciting, varied, and non-neutral", well, we've got to choose the former. I don't think those are the only two choices, but currently it's more toward the latter, and we've always got to be very careful when trying to write "vigorously" that we don't, in that vigor, cross over the line of POV. Neutrality is more important than "vigor". Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 14:58, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Vigor, conciseness, clarity, and neutrality are all important. We should not write in a formulaic, chore-like, or robot-like manner. (What's the point of having human editors, then?) Since we are presenting people's varying viewpoints here, this means that at times, things might seem subjective, even if we tried our best to remain neutral. This is a lifestyle choice, after all. The top two sections present two classes of opposing opinions. (Again, you are free to present more viewpoints in the second section if you think this is too biased in favor of the childfree/voluntarily childless.) As for the captions, I suspect you may not have seen that many from the news or scientific publications. Some of them amount to a short paragraph. As long as they are relevant to the article and support the body text, and as long as there is enough space, there is no problem here. Nerd271 (talk) 15:07, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

As to captions, that may be true for news and science publications, as they have no policies against original research or synthesis. For articles, though, extrapolating anything about the image beyond what it directly depicts is those things, so captions can't do that. I'm definitely seeing a lot of other problems too, though. I've done a spot check of sources (a comprehensive check would be longer, so there certainly may be more issues than these), and found at least a few: Citation of the claim In line with policies of family-friendliness, governments and employers typically offer support for parents, even though people without children might have to care for invalid, disabled, or elderly dependents, commitments that entail significant financial and emotional costs is sourced to [1], which does not so far as I can tell in any way discuss the issues of adult caregiving in connection or contrast with childlessness, so that's SYNTH. The source would have to explicitly make a connection between them in order for the article to. This claim, The "life" aspect of the work-life balance is often taken to mean parenting. Non-parents, including the childfree, are thus assumed to be career-focused and willing to work extra time, which is not necessarily the case. What they do with their free time is not considered as important., is stated as fact, but is sourced to [2], an editorial (note the "Commentary" tag.) Editorials can be used as a source for what their author's opinion is, but not for factual statements. There's also this source, [3], which is used for several claims—but while being published by the New York Free Press probably makes it reasonably good reliability-wise, I don't know if the book actually supports those claims or not, because book cites need page numbers, not just a citation to the book as a whole. And that's on a spot check of a couple paragraphs—so if there's more sourcing issues like those, there's a lot to be done. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 17:05, 14 June 2024 (UTC)